


Don’t Leave Me Hanging Here (With Nothing To Hold Onto)

by ShadowsLament



Series: Will You Haunt Me (To Set Us Both Free) [3]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-05-04 16:34:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14597145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: The past always comes back around.AfterOutta My Head (When You’re Not Around), which should be read first.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Honest and upfront: Updates are going to be slow in coming. I hope you'll do me the honor of reading and sticking with the fic nonetheless. As always, interest is key, so if you like it, please do let me know.

Three hooks.

Hours prior, Frank was fucking certain, his and Matt’s jackets could’ve been mistaken for conjoined shadows on the hallway wall, they’d hung so close. He leveled a glare at those three open hooks, at the long and barren stretch of wall like an Afghan desert, the imposed distance between Matt’s black field jacket and Frank’s dustier version of the same.

Narrowed eyes shifted to the open space of the apartment as Frank left the hallway for the living room, where he found nothing but dusk looking in through the windows. The warped panes cast day-old bruises onto the bare skin of his forearm. Those same vivid colors splattered one of Matt’s white shirts: unbuttoned, laid out over the far corner of the couch.

The book he’d read from the night before was dead center on the bed. They’d both been too wired to settle or fall into some semblance of sleep, so he’d turned page after page until they blurred, until the words made little fucking sense, and Matt’s head slipped from Frank’s chest to the pillow. Frank had dog-eared the page, tossed the book on the nightstand. 

Battered when he bought it, there hadn’t been a tear—sharp as a still picture of a lightning flash— running down the cover. He passed a finger over it, pushing the paper into place, and put the book back where it belonged.

Peripherally, he saw the duffle he stowed out of the way on top of Matt’s wardrobe. On the floor and wide open, white t-shirts and socks spilled over one side, knotted together like sheets shoved out of a high window. He spared a thought for the Ka-Bar stashed at the bottom of the bag, beneath black jeans and a few button-downs, before turning away.

A quick inventory of the kitchen counter turned up two mugs, a buckled roll of paper towels, what was left of the cake Leo’d made them. A clear plastic spoon next to the sugar. The baskets Matt deliberately arranged were exactly as they’d been. Nothing out of place, except—Frank snagged the handle of Hugo’s leash, pulled it from the trash, upending a dried-out coffee filter and scattering grounds that still vaguely smelled like anise. 

Leaving the leash loosely coiled on the table, Frank headed over to the closet where Matt’s—

“Frank?” Hugo loped into the room ahead of Matt. “What—”

“You give anyone else a key?”

“It was given back.” Tension turned the curve of Matt’s mouth into a question. “A while ago.”

Hugo pawed at the couch’s worn leather, claws catching.

Rising from a crouch, Frank moved to stand an arms-length from Matt, kept quiet while he examined the shirt from collar to cuff.

“What else?”

“My jacket was moved down the rack some. Hugo’s leash was in the trash, and that book I’ve been reading was on the bed. Somebody made a fucking mess of my duffle.”

“Was anything taken?”

“Didn’t look.” His family’s picture was in his wallet. The key to Matt’s apartment in his pocket. Frank kept it on him, with him, if it mattered. “You getting anything?”

“The Hudson.” Matt crossed to the bedroom. “Here, too, but fainter.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

Matt sighed. “I don’t know.”

Backed against Matt’s knees, his bulk obscuring black Oxfords tied with double knots, Hugo tipped up his head. If it was some kind of hint, Matt got it quick enough, scratching long channels through the fur at the dog’s throat.

Frank watched until his fingers ached. Until want became need, insistent as a thousand fucking pins and needles beneath a single centimeter of skin. 

The distance closed without him quite realizing it, and he was leaning over the dog, his palm on Matt’s nape. Mouth to mouth, it was, _Christ_ , it was like the lace of light that fell on their bed some early mornings, when the sun still had a ways to climb. Frank had made peace with the habit of reaching for Matt’s hand, pressing it to his chest beneath his own. Didn’t bother to count the minutes that sloughed off as he ran a thumb across Matt’s wrist, as he waited to hear that warm, sleep-slurred voice, the one Frank would bleed for, say his name. _Good morning_ , like Matt was thanking him for a gift.

“We should take Hugo for a walk.” Matt’s folded knuckle made a pass along Frank’s jaw. “Later.”

Frank nodded. “Down by the docks, maybe.”

“Do you want to call David or sh—” Matt’s attention split towards the door. “We have company.”

A heavy knock reverberated through the hallway. Came again seconds later.

Matt cut across the living room, working his tie until the strip went slack and the knot swayed beneath the swell of his collarbones. “One sec.”

Hugo pursued, and Frank matched the dog’s pace, put his shoulder to the wall when he reached it. Crossed his arms as the door opened.

“So it’s true.”

Matt’s eyebrow notched up. “Danny? Wh—”

A scruffy kid in a ratty, half-zipped hooded sweatshirt shoved past Matt. Stopped abruptly when he noticed Frank. “Who’s he?” He pointed at Hugo. “And when did you get a dog?”

The air drifting in from the stairwell was staler than cigarette smoke in the cab of a semi, but Matt inhaled it. Held it. There was something there, in the narrowed corners of his eyes, in the sharp cant of his head, as he filtered the scent.

Frank pushed away from the wall.

“The dog is Hugo,” Matt said, eventually, “and a relatively long story. And—”

“Why do you look familiar?” Danny asked, searching Frank’s face.

“Matt?”

“We can trust him.”

He didn’t offer a hand, or anything remotely like a smile. Nothing that might set the kid at ease. “Frank Cast—”

Danny snapped two fingers. “The Punisher.” He glanced back at Matt. “Why is the Punisher in your apartment?”

“Why are _you_ here, Danny?”

“Jess called,” he said, as if that meant he’d had no other choice but to show up. “To prepare me.”

Matt frowned. “For what?”

“You’re _alive_ , Matt.” The kid tracked back to Matt, right hand clenched in a tight fist, and hissed, “Why the _fuck_ didn’t you—”

A warning snarl revealed the twin tips of Hugo’s canines. 

Frank transferred the intention of his glare from the fist to Danny’s face. “You’re gonna want to back off, kid.”

“Stay out of—”

“Danny.”

“ _What_?” Danny snapped, before he noticed Matt’s mouth, pressed tight and thin, and blinked. The kid seemed to be more than passing familiar with what that expression meant. “Sorry, Matt, it’s—I haven’t been sleeping lately.” Loud and long, Danny’s stomach growled. “Or eating. Not enough.”

“Go,” Matt jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen, “there’s leftover takeout in the fridge.”

In a rush to exit the hallway, Danny cheerfully called back, “Thanks!”

The kid’s shuffling footsteps stopped. The fridge door opened. A glass bottle rattled against the next in line, and Matt’s shoulders dropped. He took a breath that hitched, like he’d forgotten somewhere in the middle of it how to proceed.

Frank lifted a hand, open and curved like it was designed to the exact specs of Matt’s face. He kept it there, inches from Matt’s skin, and waited. Dark lashes simulated flight, but then Matt leaned, tipped his head, and Frank heard the rasp of stubble against his calluses, felt it scratch across his palm.

Frank stroked with the tip of his thumb. “Who is he?”

“Danny Rand.”

“He have anything to do with that building collapse?”

“He was there,” Matt said, simply, in a tone that tried real hard to convince Frank that busted bricks and broken steel weighed as much as goddamned balloons. That acceptance of—Frank’s pulse denied it with every furious beat, and Matt knew it, said, “I told them to go, Frank. There was no reason—”

“There was every reason.”

Matt’s index finger dipped into the bow of Frank’s lip. “I—”

“What about this cake?” Danny asked, over the shuffle of cellophane. “Can I—”

“No.”

The plate scraped the counter. “Ok _ay_.” 

Matt stepped away, flipped a switch as he passed it, waking the overhead lights Frank more often than not forgot the place was fitted with, they were so rarely used. Soon as his eyes adjusted, Frank saw what Matt had already picked out: damp patches covering the kid’s sweatshirt, wrinkled like water, the color of high tide. The small spot of blood like wax sealed over one eyebrow.

“Exactly how long have you been here?” Danny asked, poking a chopstick in Matt’s direction. “Been back, I mean.”

“A while.”

The look Danny turned on Frank flickered with suspicion. “What do you want with him?”

“You got a lot of questions, yeah, but I don’t know you, kid. So—”

“At least I can say I’m his friend,” Danny shot back, “that we’re part of a team.”

Frank laughed. To his own ears it sounded like an explosion. The kind that spit shrapnel. “Some fucking team, huh, ready and willing to leave a man beh—”

“Frank.” 

Matt’s voice was like his hand was on those nights it lingered over Frank’s back or abdomen, dragging out several exquisite minutes as he tended to nasty gashes and shallow slices alike: light but certain, unflinching.

Perched on the couch’s arm, with Hugo squarely between his knees, Matt made room for Frank to heed the unspoken request or ignore it. The thing was, when Matt looked like that, faith given shape in the curves and lines of his face—Frank exhaled. Conceded.

Matt turned his head towards the kid, his lips twitching, a slight uptick at the left corner. “You would have no reason to think Jess lied to you, Danny. That’s not why you’re here.”

“What just happened?” Danny asked, in a piss-poor attempt at deflection. “He was going to hand me my ass, or he was going to try to, and now he’s not.”

Matt pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did you spend the last several hours in the river?”

“Not _in_ it,” Danny said, and Frank filed that away, how easily the kid let himself be distracted, “more like really close to it.” He skirted the counter, his energy snapping and straining like a live wire. “After Midland, I guess Jess and I had the same idea, we just weren’t focused on the same people. Matt, Gao’s alive, too.”

That drew Matt’s spine up straight. “Murakami?”

“I saw him fall, but if you’re here, and Gao made it out,” Danny shrugged, “it’s possible.”

Frank shifted. “And you figured this—”

“We tracked her,” Danny said, “to an abandoned building down by the docks. An old textile mill, I think. Whatever it was, they’re using it as a munitions storehouse now. Colleen heard Gao’s men talking. She’s working with Wilson Fisk. And someone else they call Jigsaw.”

“Jigsaw is currently residing in Rikers.” Matt’s voice was tight as a constrictor knot. “Serving a determinate life sentence.”

“So? That just means he’s pulling the strings of someone on the outside,” Danny said. “Jess is almost positive he’s supplying the weapons. Whatever he’s doing, he’s with the Hand now.”

“Even if Jigsaw is somehow involved,” Matt said, “that’s only three—”

“They’ve got all five,” Danny told him. “If Murakami _did_ make it, he could still be one. I don’t know. We haven’t been able to turn up much about the last two, or the role they’re playing.”

“Right.” Matt nodded. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Of the four of us, you and Jess are more likely to work it out, and she hasn’t been having much luck. It’s making her...cranky. And I’m talking more than usual. We can’t do this without you, Matt.”

His expression shuttered, drenched in the billboard’s bleeding red neon, Matt was silent.

Frank passed Danny without a glance, sank down on his haunches in front of Hugo, in front of Matt. The dog allowed Frank’s hand on his flank, allowed a light scratch. Each pass unsettled Matt's pant leg. “About time we took Hugo for that walk.” Then, loud enough for only the man above him to hear, “Just you and me, Matty, if that’s what you want.”

Matt’s eyes closed. “Could you work with them?”

“Are you asking me to?”

“Maybe.” Matt said, and opened his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Your call.”

In the thick cover of Hugo’s fur, Matt’s fingers fit between Frank’s. “Give me a couple of days, Danny.”

“Does that mean—”

“It means I’ll let you know if I hear anything and we’ll go from there.”

“Matt, we really—”

“You heard what he said.” Frank squeezed Matt’s hand and released him. Stood. “Come on, kid, I’ll walk you out.”

“But—”

“Thanks for checking on me, Danny.” 

Matt’s tone, modest as a slack garrote, wrapped Danny’s cheekbones in dark ribbons of color.

“Yeah, of course. I should’ve said...I really am glad you’re okay.”

Frank followed Danny down the hall. On the kid’s heels, he could’ve counted the freckles on the back of Danny’s neck. Could’ve picked out the lint and wood splinters from the cloud of his sandy hair. Wanted to put a thumbnail to the pinhole in the sweatshirt’s seam and make it wider, take the thing apart thread by thread.

“If he decides to do this,” Frank said, lowly, standing elbow to elbow with Matt’s jacket, “and one of you lets him down again, leaves him to face any of it alone, your life is forfeit. Know that.”

Danny scoffed. “You’re threatening—”

“That’s guaranteed. If Matt’s not around to stop it happening,” Frank held Danny’s defiant stare, and clearly and decisively said, “I will kill you.”

The kid gaped, sputtered, “Luke…Luke’s bulletproof.”

“You think I give a shit?” Frank asked, with a smile equipped to do more damage than an IED. “That I won’t find a way?”

Danny jerked the door open, let in a track from one of Fleetwood’s earlier albums, drifting up loud and clear from an apartment several floors below. “What if that goes both ways? What if you’re the one who lets him down and—”

“That happens, I will hand you a gun. Extra ammo ‘cause you don’t look like you can shoot for shit.”

Danny’s shoulders shoved back. “I am the Immortal Iron—”

“Yeah,” Frank swung the door shut, “that’s nice.”

He found Matt in the kitchen, picking up the cartons Danny’d left on the counter, setting the stained and bent boxes on top of two sets of chopsticks and the kid’s paper towel, compacted into a tight ball, in the trash. That done, he slid out a drawer for a pair of utensils, and moved with the cake plate to the table.

Frank accepted the fork Matt offered, sat when he did. Eyes on the tight clench of Matt’s shoulders, on the hand balanced precisely on his knee, Frank peeled back the cellophane, and with it, a fair amount of buttercream. Hugo watched Frank drag an index finger through the frosting, a hopeful whine slipping into the silence, splitting into a huff when Frank lifted that hand to coat the curve of Matt’s lower lip with the stuff. 

Matt’s tongue on the tip of Frank’s finger was warm and wet and tentative. Quick as a flash flood, something liquid like tenderness rose up, spilled over the gaps between Frank’s ribs. 

He made a sound like Hugo’s whine.

The fork Matt kept for himself hit the plate, tumbled tines first to the table. Chair legs scuffed cement and then Matt’s hand splayed over flannel, pushed until Frank’s back was flush against the narrow, padded rest of his own seat. Smoothly straddling Frank’s thighs, Matt gave Frank a taste of the vanilla melting smooth and sweet in the heat of his mouth.

Seconds, minutes, maybe an hour later, Matt said, “That wasn’t what Leo had in mind.” He tugged Frank’s head to the side with the fingers he had in his hair. “For the cake.”

Halfway to wrecked by the soft, glancing breaths Matt’s lips laid down on his cheek and jaw, Frank tried for a smile. “I won’t be lying when I tell her how much I enjoyed it.”

Matt laughed at that, but then his smile snuffed out. His fingers quit their pacing through Frank’s hair, dropped away as he made to slide off of his lap.

Frank held on tighter. “You got anything to say about it, I’m listening.”

“Honestly,” Matt shifted his sightless stare over Frank’s shoulder, “I expected you to rip into me, not—“

“What for?”

“If Danny’s right and Billy _is_ working with Gao, it’s my—”

“No.”

Matt blinked. “No?”

“How it went down with Bill was my goddamn decision.”

Matt’s mouth thinned into that same slim line that made Danny backtrack real fast.

“That night on the carousel,” Frank said, and cleared his throat, “I could’ve finished Russo. I didn’t. Where were you, Matty, when that fight went down?”

A faint smile. “Neverland.”

Frank saw it in the occasional dream: a field of bright heads bobbing over bent stems. All those flowers that marked the outskirts of the convent, threading paths through a dozen saplings, their sweet perfume blunted by sap. The attached conservatory stuffed with ferns and wicker furniture, miles of glass streaked with steam. That crooked cross on the wall and the room they’d put Matt in, empty but for the bed, gauze curtains, and a bible he couldn’t read.

Frank frowned.

“It wasn’t that bad.” 

“No,” Frank said, “it was fucking miserable.”

“And it was worth it for Hugo. Speaking of,” Matt said, and this time Frank didn’t stop him from standing, “we should probably take him out.“

The dog went with Matt into the bedroom. Frank watched a black suit jacket land on the mattress, spread over sheets that had parted around their book. “The timing bothering you?”

A sudden silence, drawn out for the count of an arrhythmic heartbeat, and then, “There’s nothing here that identifies you.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

Matt came back wearing jeans, a black sweatshirt. His glasses. “Let’s go.”

The lights were off before Frank’s ass cleared the seat. Matt had the door open, had already hustled into the hall, when Frank made a grab for his hat, abandoned on the bench days before. As they descended, Stevie Nicks’ voice dipped into a lower register, anchored the lyrics into the hollows of a snare drum’s driving beat. If Matt heard the music, or the moans on the opposite side of a cracked door they passed, he showed no sign of it.

“Matty.” The brisk night air took the sound, threw it in Frank’s face when, long seconds later, nothing came of it. “Hey,” he tried again, “talk to me.”

Matt’s head was down, like he could see the cracks in the ground to count them, and it stayed that way. “About?”

“The Rand kid. Midland,” Frank suggested. “Whatever the goddamn Hand is, or—”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

Hugo paused to sniff the box at the base of a tall stack. The cardboard was warped, ripe with bananas. The dog nosed over to the next crate, a bunch of bruised avocados, and Matt let the leash extend. His expression, Frank realized, presented like the 737 pushing into cloud cover overhead, gaining distance by the second. 

“Matt, what’m I—”

“I don’t need to be handled.”

“Handled,” Frank repeated. “And how do you figure I’ve been doing that?”

Finished with the fruit, Hugo rounded back to Matt. Licked the white knuckles on the hand that held the leash. Whined a bit when Matt didn’t loosen it up, didn’t pat or scratch. 

“Unless you’re going to kiss me again,” Matt said, his doubt about that plain, “then—”

Frank stepped up, got ahold of Matt’s chin. He kept the kiss soft, kept it brief. Murmured, “Anytime, anywhere.”

Matt exhaled, rubbed the back of his neck. “You know I heard what you said to Danny.”

“The kid needed to be put on notice. That’s fair.”

“That’s not what—Frank, if something happens to me, it won’t be your—”

“Are we walking,” Frank scratched his jaw, eyes on a cab with the windows rolled all the way down and a knock-off Steamboat Willie fixed to the dash, “or what?”

Hugo tugged, hard, all the answer either of them needed. 

Matt sidestepped a couple of young women wrapped up in each other, their heads bent so close, blonde hair braided through black. Their hands were clasped tighter than a secret, and maybe Frank couldn’t make out their whispered conversation, but Matt sure did. Whatever was said, it prompted a rueful smile.

“What?”

With a gesture that indicated the two of them, Matt asked, “Do we suck at this?”

“Everyone sucks at it.” Frank shrugged. “But when it’s worth it? You pay attention. Try to suck at it less.”

“Everything about this,” Matt admitted, after a long while, “bothers me.” Knuckles grazed knuckles as they erased another block. “The timing. Billy’s potential involvement. Danny’s assumption that I…”

“No denying the kid had it right,” Frank said, when Matt proved reluctant to see his thought out to the end. “If they’re after intel, you’re their best shot. That doesn’t mean we have to jump to. Pitch in with them.” He looked sideways, recognized the resignation that weighted the corner of Matt’s eye, that drew down the lines there. “But if that’s what we’re going to do, then—”

“No.” Matt shook his head. “I’m not going to ask you to work with them. Or even to get involved. The Hand, whatever they’re planning now, it’s mine to deal with,” he insisted, “I can—”

“Hey,” Frank said, resolute, “I’m with you.”

Matt’s eyebrow arched. “End of story?” 

Frank grinned. “You’re catching on.”

The air at the docks was different, stilted and salted, colder. Lapping waves, stumbling over stones, pushed against Frank’s memory of Lisa wearing a sheath of sand, just covered in the stuff, well beyond her elbows. Passing between the beams of an old pier, she’d held onto this plastic shovel and bucket—purple, white handle—that matched her suit, the one she’d picked out, insisted on. Stubborn as her mother, and—

“Frank?”

A strong hand on his lower back. Claws swiping his shin, his boot. A series of car horns, a mile or more back, quick jabs puncturing the quiet.

Frank blinked once, rasped, “Good.” He risked a quick rub across Hugo’s broad head. “I’m good.”

“There’s nothing here.” Matt ran that hand up Frank’s back, turning his body in, closer, a buffer against the wind coming up off the water. “We can go back.”

“After walking all this fucking way?”

Matt’s lips quirked. Looking at it, at that amused curl, Frank registered the cotton stretched over his scarred skin, registered the hat’s black band, doing its level best to flatten his hair. He felt his heartbeat settle, and didn’t take his eyes off of the reason for its easing.

“We could sit,” Matt said, extending his grin, “if you need to catch your breath.”

“You wanna go on a hike,” Frank steered Matt, Hugo, over to a bench pocked by flaking paint where it wasn’t covered in ink from the barrel of a ballpoint pen, “I’m game.”

Hugo jumped up, scooted over until he’d draped his front half over Matt’s legs. One paw came to rest on Frank’s thigh. Panting to pick up all the air had to provide, the dog’s dark eyes skimmed over the water, over the lights that bobbed on the surface like a flotilla of white toy boats.

With his arm braced on the bench’s bowed backrest, Frank sketched nonsense on Matt’s shoulder, followed the route of Hugo’s stare. The pedestrian railings looked like the kind the ferry had installed, but he wasn’t going there, wasn’t going to reach for his kids twice in so many minutes. Not with Matt there beside him, not when he was shadowboxing with his own past.

“I’ll get David on it,” Frank said. “Can’t be so many mills still standing that it’ll be hard to find.”

Matt tugged loose fur free and cast it off. His throat worked without producing a sound.

Quietly, Frank said, “Doesn’t matter what it is, Matt.”

“I think I know who it was,” Matt told him, “in the apartment.”


	2. Chapter 2

_His palms were lined with grit. Hatch marked with raw scrapes and bloodied nicks._

_Matt focused on that—on the dust of crushed cement veiling his face, coating his hands. Kept his thoughts from reaching for the puncturing weight on his chest and thighs, the sharp-toothed debris biting into his back._

_His tongue was dry with dirt, swollen with prayer, and Matt couldn’t swallow either. He tried, tried—why couldn’t he—muscles straining his throat, attempting to form a question, a name that pierced like a sharpened sai._

_A muffled sob rent the shivering quiet; it rang and echoed in his—_

“Matt.”

_His fingers twitched over broken stone. The spasm that racked his biceps, gripped his—_

“Matty.”

_Matt wanted to lift his arm. Couldn’t. He had to—Beneath a taut, low keening, he heard a sickening squelch, his wrist pinned by—_

“Sweetheart.” _Matt frowned. All other sound settled into near silence._ “You gotta wake up for me.”

 _Halfway between a plea and a demand, that gruff voice. Matt knew it like he knew the dark, had felt its vibration against his fingertips, against his tongue. But…the man it belonged to wasn’t…he hadn’t been—_ Matt blinked his eyes open, rapidly, and went still with a noose’s length of sheet slipped around his wrist. There was metal in his mouth, blood pooling like melted copper behind his teeth. A long exhale shook before it held, before he recognized the second heart beating in his bed. “Frank.” 

“Yeah.” Warm breath kissed Matt’s temple. A broad hand wearing a thin glove of sweat crested the ridge of his abdomen. “Yeah, I’m here.”

Fire licked the walls of Matt’s absent vision. Red as a remembered sunrise. Red as his father’s boxing robe. Red as blood, as life. Below Midland, after—There was only black, spilled like tar. If Matt had been able to get a hand out from beneath however many pounds of rubble, it wouldn’t have mattered: The black wouldn’t rub away, wouldn’t transfer to his fingers as tacky grime to be washed off by water and soap that stung like an entire citrus field had been drained.

“I woke you up.” Matt ignored the shreds of his voice, tested his toes, one through ten, against Hugo’s ribs. The dog pressed back, and Matt felt it: the heat of him, the tickling slide of fur beneath both heels. “I’m sorry.”

“Save it.” Frank curled closer. A stranger watching him move so slowly, seeing how lightly he maintained his hold, might not have believed there was a sledgehammer within easy reach beneath the bed. An unsheathed, straight edge Ka-Bar stashed in the nightstand’s drawer. “I could read.”

Hugo’s head dipped down to the mattress, a syncopated series of snorts signaling his return to rest, while Matt concentrated on the outline of a serrated scar tucked into the fold of Frank’s elbow. A pause to nod, then Matt found the cutting edge, began again.

Frank made quick work of retrieving the book. His wrist at ease on Matt’s stomach, he opened to a page that smelled strongly of must, of leaky pipes and days-old water. Like a used bookstore, Frank’s favorite.

“I thought I was so tough, but gentled at your hands, cannot be quick enough,” Frank read, “to fly for you and show that when I go I go at your commands. Even in flight above I am no longer free: you seeled me with your love, I am blind to other birds—The habit of your words has hooded me.”

Propped up on an elbow, Frank brushed the next line across Matt’s forehead. “You but half civilize me, taming me this way. Through having only eyes for you I fear to lose, I lose to keep, and choose tamer as prey.”

Frank’s pulse had shifted into a small seismic event. He slid a thumb over the page, gathering the paper in rippling waves to turn it over, and Matt could imagine the determined shape of Frank’s mouth, had to stop himself from kissing it loose, kissing it open. 

A tug on the book freed it from Frank’s hand. “I’d like to visit your bookstore.”

Frank sealed his empty hand over Matt’s navel. “This weekend,” he agreed, solid again and steady, sketching interlocking figure eights on Matt’s skin with his thumb. “We’ll go, but if you think the book smells bad—“

“I’ve smelled worse.”

“I bet you have.”

Matt’s assenting hum fell in with a foreign lullaby gracefully pacing the floor three flights below. Four months, he realized, listening closely. It had been four months since that morning he’d met Camille in the hall, her newborn daughter cradled against her chest in a cotton sling. Left with the impression of smoke and sharp heels, silk scarves with gardenias blooming in the knot, he’d waited while she climbed the stairs. Remained there long after she’d called down _Au revoir, Matthew_.

Their voices weren’t the same, it wasn’t that, but—

“Hey.”

“Hmm?”

“You don’t want to say much about it,” Frank said quietly, “I get that. But since Rand turned up you keep disappearing on me, Matt, even when—“ Rough fingers raked through Frank’s thick, curling hair. “You’re my guide here, okay. The one who knows what the fuck we’re dealing with. I’m gonna need you to lay it out—”

“It’s not—“ Matt breathed out through his nose, a short, heavy huff, one he’d heard from Hugo countless times since the dog had found him on the convent’s back steps. Matt knew what came next, knew he wouldn’t be able to answer the questions Frank would raise, and that he’d try anyway and fail. The blood left in his mouth turned to rust. “Elektra died that night on the roof. The Hand brought her back.”

For a split second Frank’s heartbeat flatlined. “How?”

Matt turned his head on the pillow. “I can’t give them back to you, Frank, I would if—“

“Don’t.” Hard as a concrete wall. One that hadn’t stood between them in so long Matt had lost track. “Don’t.”

Silk pulled taut beneath Matt’s legs as Hugo stretched. Were the sheets red? Black? Matt was never certain, not when he chose them, or when he changed them, stripping the bed of sweat and semen and an atom of gun oil. He didn’t know their color, only that, suddenly, he couldn’t stay in them. Rolling to the edge of the mattress, swinging his legs down to stand, the floor bit like ice, but it was preferable to—

“Where are you going?” Frank sat up when Matt pulled on a pair of sweatpants, a t-shirt that might or might not have been his. “Matt?”

His stomach clenched to hear confusion crease the voice that had pulled him back from the collapse, but Matt jerked his shoulders up in a shrug, kept walking. Hugo followed, a shadow cut off by the access door to the roof. 

Unimpeded, the wind’s wide wingspan ruffled a dozen small puddles, running the rainwater off in rivulets towards the building’s single unclogged gutter. The abused aluminum groaned where it pulled away from the mortar. It shook.

Goosebumps wrote over Matt’s skin in broken braille. He crossed his arms, raked his palms up from elbows to biceps repeatedly, but couldn’t recreate Frank’s heat, his—

“You wear freezing cold beautifully, _sweetheart_.”

Matt closed his eyes, raised his chin. Air flavored by the Hudson’s salt and seaweed, by myrrh oil drawn around slight wrists like braids of black licorice, stirred as he balanced his weight across both feet. “Elektra.” 

“For so long you’ve made due without an animal,” she said evenly, tightening concentric circles around Matt, permeating his space with her scent, the silence of her heartbeat, “and now you allow one to follow wherever you go.”

“Hugo—“

“Not that one.” Elektra smoothed loose knuckles, the back of one soft-skinned hand, down Matt’s cheek. “The other, who believes his bite to be as sharp as his bark. Frank, isn’t it?”

The firm, fine line of Matt’s mouth trembled. His pulse snapped at her fingers on his throat. “You haven’t been paying attention,” he said, “if you think Frank is only imagining that.”

“He’s an overgrown lapdog at best.” Her sigh flickered, warm as a lighter’s flame held close to the worn cotton of Frank’s shirt. Shifting her head on Matt’s shoulder, she murmured, “He’s not for you, Matthew.”

“Are you?” The question was hollowed out by repetition, by every one of the sun-drenched mornings he’d woken up with a variation of it in his dully aching head. How many times had he argued her side, his stance, for a jury of one? Two, if Stick was—“You got me to the convent.”

It wasn’t a question, and Elektra responded accordingly: not at all. 

“You left me there, when you could have—“

Soft lips slanted over the hinge of his jaw. “There were other things to tend to.”

Matt nodded, and nodded. He laughed, a little wild, a little like a one-winged starling’s attempt at flight. “You broke into my apartment. You’re here _now_ , lecturing me on my choice of lovers, insulting him, when your hands are no cleaner.” He stepped back, turned towards the door. “Don’t do that again. Any of it, Elektra.”

“Murakami is alive.” Her voice carried over the first wave of alarms waking the city, reached for him from the building’s ledge. “He’s maintained his place as a finger of the Hand.”

Chilled water parted around Matt’s stalled feet. “How—“

“I know a great deal, Matthew. About Jigsaw, an exceptionally angry man, that one. And about Danny Rand’s visit. Seeking your aid is the only intelligent move he’s made in quite some time. But,” she said, “I’m here, _now_ , asking you to leave it alone. Deny his request.” 

“Why? What—“

“Matthew.” His name from her lips had always found Matt like the sleek slide of her hair over his stomach. It lingered nearly as long as the marks she left with enthusiasm on that strip of skin, on his—“Please.”

Asking any of the questions gathering in his throat would be pointless: Elektra’s scent had receded like the river that gave it shape. Matt could track her, could soak up the rainwater on other roofs, but he let himself hear Hugo, on the wrong side of the door, scratching and gouging the wood. He absorbed the punch Frank landed against his pillow, listened to him shift until he was mostly on Matt’s side of the bed, the geometry of his body, every naked line and hard-muscled curve, locked in a holding pattern.

An itch flared in the center of Matt’s palm, one he’d felt before, every time he thought of scraping it over scars that added up to a number not his own, when he remembered the warmth his fingers found in Frank’s hair, in the hollow of his throat, against the stubbled notch of his jaw.

Turning the battered steel doorknob, Matt braced as Hugo spilled out.

****

“So what did you do?”

Frank put an elbow on either knee and rested there, with his head down. He glanced at Curt’s shoes, at the deeper fold of his left pant leg over exactly tied laces. To the floor, carpeted in sticking coffee stains, he said, “I faked sleep like some kind of goddamned teenager, and he pretended like he didn’t know it.”

“And this morning?”

“Had a client to meet down at the courthouse.” Frank linked fingers to crack his knuckles. “Took off pretty quick.”

“Then all that’s left, I guess, is to ask what you’re going to do later.” Curt leaned on over, bumped Frank’s shoulder. “And I’ll tell you this, Frank, the answer better be talk to him.”

Frank dropped a hand down, picked up the styrofoam cup centered between his boot heels. There was nothing in it but dregs, dark as Elektra’s eyes. Up on that roof, she didn’t take hers off of Matt. Not for a minute. She got real close, looked at him like she was the one, the only one, who felt the flames he tried to contain with those glasses. And maybe that was right, because what Frank saw in Matt’s eyes was a sea underneath night’s cover, dark with a host of different hungers, but then he’d smile, and there was the sun, an anchor for the drowning. 

Frank would feed himself to those waters, no hesitation, for the rest of—But that was if Matt—Sharply, with a shotgun crack, one sloped side of the styrofoam split. Frank shook his hand, fanned it out. “What’m I supposed to say? Huh? That I’ll get my ass gone now that his girlfriend’s back in the picture?”

Curt swiped the mangled cup from Frank’s grip. “I don’t believe for one second that you want—“

“What I want doesn’t matter.” Frank lifted his head, stared hard at the flyers stapled to the bulletin board: advertisements for food drives and blood drives, requests for pledges for 5k marathons and a good home for a litter of striped kittens. “It’s not a factor.”

“And why is that?”

“He was willing to die for her, Curt. Almost did.”

“Shit, Frank, you stuck around when that bomb was strapped to my chest. I begged you to go, and you refused. That’s who you are,” Curt said. “You think Matt’s any different? That he’d give less than you?”

Frank swallowed, narrowed his eyes on a blackened knot in the wood paneling nailed to the wall.

“I know you know better than that.” Curt shook his head, smiled that small, knowing smile that drove home exactly how much it didn’t matter, the number of books Frank read, because he would never be as smart or as clear-sighted as the man sitting next to him. “Would you want Matt gone if Maria came back?”

Tension leaked into Frank’s shoulders. He felt it slip a finger down his spine. “Curt—“

“You’d give him up? Is it like that, Frank, is Matt just a bad habit you—“

Frank shoved out of his seat. The metal folding chair squawked, pitched precariously forward on thin, rust-speckled legs. Standing, swaying, he could do nothing to stop fists from forming. His teeth ground tight; it was an effort to loosen his jaw. It was an effort to breathe. “He’d walk away. Matt would walk away.”

“I’d argue that point, but right now,” Curt said, “I want to know if you’d let him.”

“I—“ Frank licked his lips, tasted black, bitter coffee. “Fuck, Curt, I don’t know. And what’s it matter? Maria, she’s not—Whatever was done to Elektra—It’s not the same.”

“You _do_ know, and it does matter.”

Frank sat back down, hard. The key in his pocket nipped his thigh. Matt did that, too, when impatience colored his skin to match the sheets, and again, after—

“From what little you saw, he didn’t even touch her, so be the grown-ass man you are and ask Matt what actually happened.” Curt tossed his cup and Frank’s into the trash, one after the other. Sank them both, no sweat. “If you don’t ask, you’ll only choke on the not knowing.”

“I called him a coward once,” Frank admitted, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I, ah…I got it wrong. That’s not him. I’m—”

“You’re afraid of losing one more good thing, Frank, but that’s just human nature. No judgement to be placed on it.” 

Curt stretched out, crossing his legs at the ankle. He pulled out the hardcover poking up from his bag on the floor, turned it over with both hands, his fingertips sliding over cobalt cloth worn smooth by the repetition of that same motion. He’d spent some nights with it, Frank figured, long nights with nothing more than ink beneath his touch, but with a stretch of dreamless hours in front of him. 

It had been a while since Frank had reached for a book instead of Matt to find lasting respite. He thought maybe there was no going back. That sinking into somebody else’s story, somebody else’s life, would only ever pale to nothing compared to sinking into Matt. Not just the tight heat of him, but his conversation, the deep shelter of his laughter. Fuck that: Frank _knew_ it. Just like he knew it was stupid of him to think for one goddamn minute that he had time, that he wouldn’t have to confirm that suspicion so soon.

“So you know,” Curt said, “I’d choose you. Strong, easy enough on the eyes when you’re not beat to shit. A little dense sometimes, maybe, but—“

Frank smiled, one corner lifting higher than the other, and when he caught sight of Curt’s shit-eating grin, laughed even though it shook. “Hey, fuck you.”

“I’m gonna leave that to Matt, if it’s all the same.”

“Leave what to Matt?” David’s hair was a sandstorm churned up by the hand he scratched through it, standing in the doorway, lobbing an expectant look between Frank and Curt. “And why does it smell like a cat pissed in the coffee urn?” 

“One of the mysteries of life, my friend,” Curt said. “How’s it going, David?”

“Everyone okay?” Frank asked.

David nodded. “I thought we could go shopping.”

“Shopping?” Frank asked, and did not blink. 

“For clothes.” David’s brow lifted. “I found this place—“

“An old mill down by the water would be my guess.” Curt tucked the book in his bag, loose paper padding either side of the cover, and stood. His chair folded with a clatter before he put it on the rack with three, four others. “Frank filled me in.”

Stepping into the room, David’s gaze reluctantly peeled away from the open box of donuts next to a carton of cream and stack of cups and swung over to settle on Frank. “You did?”

“Yeah.” Frank got up and made for the table. He picked out a cruller and shoved it at David. “There a reason I shouldn’t have?”

“No,” David managed around a mouthful of airy fried dough, bits of glaze crumbling into the wiry strands of his beard. “It’s more that you’re a wily bastard too used to doing things on your own to usually even consider, you know, talking.” He took another bite. “To someone other than Matt.” Another, chewed slowly. “Or Hugo, when he lets you.”

Curt handed David a napkin but smiled at Frank. “He’s come around some.” 

“Too much, maybe,” Frank muttered, without a trace of gravel, anything that might kick up and hit one of the other men. “You came down here to give me an address?“

David jangled his keys. “Door to door service.”

Pointing up at a window filmed with a bunch of pigeon feathers plastered to the pane, Curt asked, “Are you double-parked out there?”

“Maybe?”

“We might be walking after all,” Frank said, and nodded to Curt. “Thanks for—“ He gestured towards his empty chair. “Thanks.”

“Ask him, Frank,” Curt echoed. “And while you’re at it remind him I’m still waiting on that rematch.”

Walking the long corridor to the exit, David flickered in Frank’s peripheral, catching up and falling back a pace. Buzzing as bad as the fluorescent lighting that made the walls appear jaundiced. Frank kept his mouth shut, and hit the door’s punch bar to the right of a pink patch of hardened gum and a hole in the metal wider than a .50 caliber sniper round.

Bleached sunlight spread across the hood of David’s van. Frank checked the windshield for an orange envelope, caught David’s reflection looking at him from different angles, different seconds of the day, as he rounded the bumper to the driver’s side. 

The door slammed shut behind Frank. He turned in his seat. “Spit it out.”

David concentrated on the wing mirror, on the cars that sent a shiver down the van’s side in their wake. “Don’t be a fucking idiot.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” The radio played quiet as an afterthought, the song momentarily drowned out by a car horn after David narrowly switched lanes. “Leo bought you a book to read to Matt. Used her own money. It’s beneath the seat.”

Frank shifted his foot back, pressed his heel into the gap. It connected with the crisp corner of a paper bag. “She didn’t have to do that.”

“Say the word,” David glanced over, “and she’ll kick Elektra’s ass.”

Frank stared at a pair of brake lights until they blurred. “How much did you hear?”

“Enough to say with certainty that if you walk away Leo will kick _your_ ass.”

Both Frank and Matt had taught Leo a few moves, ways to break holds and noses. Her hair tugged back into a severe tail, Frank knew snipers who’d envy her focus, how she never seemed to notice the strands that worked loose, that stuck to her open mouth, how she refused to be distracted by her brother pulling faces, or by Hugo’s antics, shimmying on his back across the grass in the backyard. It was always Matt who realized, Matt who slipped the strands behind her ear. After the lesson, when Leo wrapped her arms around Matt’s waist in thanks, she’d press the candy apple red curve of her cheek to his chest and sigh.

Yeah, Frank could see her doing it, kicking his ass. “I guess that settles it then.”

Without an impediment of traffic, David kept the van going at a good clip. He zipped up his jacket one-handed, fiddled with the heat, and finally smacked the dash above the vents. They coughed up some dust, a brief blast of lukewarm air. Under his breath David mumbled something about junkyards and piece-of-shit vehicles, and Frank remembered saying something of the kind to Matt on the return trip from the convent, while he mopped up water Hugo managed to get everywhere except down his throat.

“There.” 

David pointed out a long, squat building that was all brick where it wasn’t fitted with rows of glass, windows that were mostly intact. A single green-capped turret stood near the middle of the place; behind it, a soot-stained chimney bearing an indecipherable year—1840, maybe, or ’41. Frank squinted before he gave it up and lowered his sights to the neglected shrubbery shielding the foundation. 

“The closest camera is about a mile back,” David said, putting the van in park. “Last time I checked the feed there were a couple of joggers and a DPW truck coming down this way.”

“Okay.” Frank got out, rapped a knuckle on the closed door. “Stay here.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon, Frank.”

“So?”

“I hardly think—“

“You got that right.”

Unperturbed by Frank’s glare, David pointed out, “It’s a big place to cover by yourself.”

“Wasn’t plannin’ on walking the entire thing.” 

Frank pushed aside a mass of branches, green leaves like vertebrae running straight up to the tip. He looked in one window, then another a couple feet down the line. The interior was dim, shadowed by a hulking piece of equipment that Frank saw was covered in sections with drop cloths. A second scan of the area for movement or vehicles, that DPW truck David mentioned, came up empty. 

The padlock on the nearest door was busted; it reeked of booze, something cheap enough to waste. Frank flicked the shackle. “Convenient.”

Chewing at his lip, David pushed a hand into the pocket with his phone. “Should we wait for Matt? If there’s anyone inside—”

“I’ll deal with it,” Frank said, and crossed over the threshold. “If I say go, you go. Don’t fucking wait for me. Got it?”

David nodded, stopped just inside. “It looks like the Natural History Museum ate a UPS store and threw up in here.”

The room went on and on. Boxes and crates took up a lot of the real estate, but it was the machines lined up on either side that narrowed the space, long-ass machines that were designed and built to split apart, the wheels on one half set into tracks that ran back four, five feet. Empty rollers sat still in front of metal hooks, some rusted, others bent at the curve. 

“Spinning mules.”

Frank looked over, watched David prick his middle finger on a spindle. “What’s that, Sleeping Beauty?”

“The machines. Invented in the 1700s by Samuel Crompton.” David wandered over to a crate set crosswise on top of another and pushed at the lid. Peering in, his brow went up fast and high. “Rifles. A lot of them.”

“Military grade?”

“Yeah, they look it.”

“Rand got that right, then.” Frank shoved back the top on a crate bigger than all the rest. “What—“

“Is that…bone?” David leaned in, swept aside tangled strings of wood fiber packed in around the crate’s perimeter. “What the fuck are they dealing in? Woolly mammoths?”

“We are not invested in that species’ de-extinction.”

The man’s breath moved on Frank’s neck like the honed edge of the Last Ditch stashed in his boot. In his peripheral, Frank saw David hold up both hands, elbows parallel to shoulders. His right hand was closed, fingers curled around something small, something that might’ve been an inhaler.

“It’s the fur, yeah?” Frank said, eyes on a window, on the reflection of a trim man in a silver suit with no discernible weapon in hand. “Probably they shed like a—“

“It was foolish of you to come here.”

Frank shrugged. “I’ve been known to not think a thing all the way through.”

David snickered, coughed to cover it and nearly choked. “C-conflict doesn’t agree with me. Indigestion, you know?”

“You will thank me, then, for this.” 

The reflection blurred. 

Frank wrenched the crate’s wooden lid over and up, and swung, cutting through open air. A splintered corner hit the ground next to David, sprawled on his side with an arm out and hand open, the inhaler several inches off his fingertips. His eyes were closed. His mouth was slack, and the fucker responsible for it was no—Frank sniffed, tilting his head, tempting the needle tip suddenly in position to become intimately familiar with his jugular.

“Will the Devil come for you?”

Frank cut his eyes over to the steady hand holding the syringe. Snarled, “You better fucking hope not.”

The man—Murakami, Frank would place short odds on it—remained impassive. “Perhaps.”

Frank’s nostrils flared as the needle bit. He blinked, his eyelids heavy for not being swollen, for…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Frank reads towards the beginning of the chapter is Thom Gunn's "Tamer and Hawk," and I have to admit to excluding the next to last stanza: "As formerly, I wheel / I hover and I twist, / But only want the feel, / In my possessive thought, / Of catcher and caught / Upon your wrist." 
> 
> While comments/kudos don't stand alone in underpinning motivation and momentum, they certainly give it a solid boost, and those of you who left either or both on the first chapter, I can't tell you how much you are appreciated.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter. This chapter fought me tooth and nail. I kept all of the false starts, all of the paragraphs that leaned in a direction that felt a few inches or feet off the mark, all of the words that seemed to have traction only to slip before a comma or period could be put down. Whether or not it's where it needs to be, where it _could_ be, I wouldn't have anyone think this fic abandoned.

“Sarah.” Matt pressed the phone between shoulder and ear, adjusting his grip on Hugo’s leash, on the worn-smooth leather handles of the briefcase in his other hand. “Is—“

“I have been calling you, and calling you, where the _fuck_ have you—“

“The courthouse.” A shadow of quiet paralleled the building on the left. Matt turned the corner, gripping the phone tighter. “What’s wrong?”

“David found the mill,” Sarah’s low voice vibrated with strain, “he went to see Frank, and they must have gone to check it out. After everything that’s happened, David rigged one of Zack’s old inhalers into a kind of alarm, so I’d know if he was in trouble.”

Hugo’s nose shoved against the peaks of Matt’s knuckles. More than the force, the shock of wet cold loosened Matt’s fist. “When did it go off?”

“Three hours ago.”

A quick, static breath. “Where?” 

“Make sure he calls me, Matt,” Sarah said, after relaying the mill’s location. “As soon as possible. _Please_.”

“I will.”

Matt wrapped the leash around his wrist, tighter than layers of boxing tape, and gave Hugo enough lead to scythe through the evening’s sidewalk traffic. Overcrowded with men soaked in sweat and cologne, women in stalk-thin heels, a couple of kids stubbing their shoes against fresh gum on the pavement, Matt shoved through until the mixed scent of Thai coffee and leaked motor oil gave way to the dry soil anchoring a pair of potted peach trees on his block.

Letting go of the leash and all pretense, Matt covered the twenty feet to his building’s front door at a dead run.

***

The chair was all wood, no metal glides. Hostage situations being a dime a dozen in his past life, Frank didn’t need a look at it to know the chair being dragged over damaged hardwood was held at a forty-five degree angle. The dust it stirred found his nostrils like a finer grain of desert sand. He’d breathed through that and worse before, kept at it until his lungs were hourglasses malformed, until he was certain his time wasn’t up. 

Head low, chin held away from clavicle by the strained leash of muscle at the back of his neck, Frank slit open his eyes. There was the black of his jeans, streaked with dirt and speckled with that dust that seemed to halo every damn thing, along with the idea of a floor, an impression of stained planks and nails like a handful of bones bent to a new purpose after a break. 

The muffled scrape of the chair went suddenly silent about a foot off the toe of Frank’s boot. Where maybe an ass would’ve shuffled back on the seat, a question or demand would’ve been voiced, there was an absolute absence of sound that held for what had to’ve been a solid two, three minutes. 

“This supposed to scare me?”

“Do you scare so easily?”

The rope tied tight enough to chew skin skimmed another layer off Frank’s wrists. 

Lifting his head, he saw that she’d braided all that hair, secured it with a thin black band barely visible against the pitch of her shirt. It had been loose, before, flicking around her face on the tail end of the wind. When she’d breached Matt’s space to use his shoulder as bedrock, long, damp strands had stuck to his throat. Frank watched it happen, watched those dark strands cling like her hands on Matt’s hips, and couldn’t do a goddamn thing about his own right hand, tendons curling to tear and rend, seizing up like that. 

“No.” His voice might’ve been a compactor filled to the lid with gravel and cans. “I do not.”

Elektra looked at his mouth before his eyes, and laughed. “Liar.”

Beyond her shoulder, dead center on a long and unbroken wall, a strip of paint peeled away like the skin of a Granny Smith. Where that faded color held no sway there were nested boxes of crown molding, all dark walnut wood, and inset mirrors missing large shards. Despite the damage to the glass, Frank made out a dozen or so working Edison bulbs in the light fixture suspended overhead, and running along the opposite wall, a fancy bar roughly the length of three subway cars. A wide door behind it wore two heavy locks, had the added insurance of a keypad above the doorknob.

An arsenal of chairs stacked three deep were shoved in a corner.

“From where I’m sitting,” he said, returning to the pointed outline of Elektra’s face, “you’ve been holding down that corner of the market.”

“Yes, well, the view from the cheap seats is often somewhat blurred, is it not.” A feminine hand nicked with slight scars gestured to the ceiling’s intricate gold molding; to the wide, stone-shrouded fireplace set far back and to the right. “This place could be beautiful again. Billy’s preoccupations, however, have shifted the balance of his money elsewhere.” Her head tipped towards windows curtained in thick grime. “You’ve had several opportunities to kill him and took none of them. How is it, exactly, that you came to be known as the Punisher? It seems—”

“You wanna tell me _exactly_ how it is you know Bill?”

“I know a great deal.” Elektra shrugged. “As I’ve said before, to Matthew.”

The way she said the name, like an invocation of a personal saint, or like Frank needed the fucking reminder that she _knew_ Matt, that her memory of his man was informed as much by her hands and mouth as it was by hours and days, _goddamn_ , but it—Tasting metal, Frank put his tongue behind his teeth. He let his nostrils flare, let his nose pinch back like the place reeked of horseshit. “Why get me out of the mill? Huh? And where the fuck is—”

“I thought we might have a chat,” Elektra said. “One your supposedly asthmatic friend needn’t overhear. As it is, Matthew has likely already returned him to his rightful place.”

The filthy state of the windows—and the patches of paper haphazardly put up to block sight of the building’s interior—made it impossible to judge just how dark it was streetside. If it was late enough for Daredevil to be out scaling fire escapes, like she thought—Frank breathed in, breathed easier, turned loose the questions he’d anchored to David’s safety. “You always tie up the people you wanna talk to?”

“When their tendency is to maim first, talk never.”

Frank smiled, small. “That your way of saying I scare you?”

“Hardly.”

The smile stretched to show off a set of canines. “Liar.”

Frank waited for that smart mouth to open. To take a bite or spit. Didn’t think she’d opt to study him instead, raking those dark-as-dregs eyes over his hair, left on the long side to provoke Matt’s fingers, before dropping to comb through Frank’s short beard. He’d decided to keep it after he saw the color it drew over Matt’s skin: a red to match the naked cover of Coleridge’s _Mariner_ , this ancient copy they’d found in a beat-up cardboard box marked for the trash. Frank had read it out twice; the second time around for Leo. Shoes off, borrowed sweatshirt sleeves blanketing every knuckle, she wasn’t inside the apartment for more than a short stack of minutes before she’d curled up around Hugo on the couch next to Matt. Looking for all the world like she was home.

Frank remembered reading to the end of the third or fourth page before he glanced at his own feet: bare, scarred, both soles familiar with the rug’s pits and thin spots, the warp in a few of the floorboards. The warmth contained in Matt’s footsteps when Frank followed him from the bed to the kitchen for that first cup of coffee. He remembered thinking—

“Losing him,” Elektra said so quietly Frank might’ve imagined the words, “is incomprehensible.”

“So is leaving him.” Frank leaned forward until the rope decided he was done. “But you did that.”

“Yes.” Pain in the word, tolling like one of Matt’s church bells. It kept on sounding. “You wouldn’t be in his bed otherwise.”

“And you want back in it.” Frank chewed on that image, spat out, “If you think for one goddamn minute—”

“Above all else,” Elektra interrupted, cold and implacable as the city in mid-January, “I want your help.”

Possible scenarios poured in, one after another, all of ‘em with something in common: a view of Frank’s sloped shoulders, his hunched back. Empty hands in his pockets. Boots eating ground in the opposite direction of an apartment with walls painted nightly in neon hues, chew toys—bribes he’d offered up on a regular basis—scattered under the furniture, books on every flat surface, and a Devil-red suit in a trunk in one makeshift closet. The picture of Maria and the kids was still in his wallet. The key that had reopened every part of him, that was gone.

Frank shook his head. “Pass.”

“Really?” That braid slipped, slid back. If Frank had been able to he might’ve reached for it like any other weapon, but Elektra ignored its singular swing, said, “And here I was under the impression you cared for Ma—”

Frank snarled. “Do not.”

“Hear me out, then.” Under the strong arch of her eyebrows, Elektra stared until Frank grunted. Rightly, she took it as a go-ahead. “Matthew’s never willingly given a history lesson in his life, but I know that he will, on occasion, isolate a scar to tell its story. In broad strokes, perhaps, but a man made of warfare can surely fill in any gaps. Am I wrong?”

Frank’s lips thinned. It was as good an answer as she was going to get, and she knew it.

“The Hand has shaped a large percentage of the stories he could tell. You know how each one ends,” she said. “A masked man limps off, swallowed by pain, and darkness.” A sigh, saturated with its own history. “Matthew is nothing if not stubborn.”

“Determined.” Frank cocked his head. “You ever think of resurrecting the penny dreadful? I bet you’d—”

“He will not survive, Frank.” Elektra inhaled, and Frank wondered when the breath would end, lungs topped off. When it finally did, he thought, _no way_ , that amount of air wasn’t going to support whatever it was she had to say next. “If Matthew persists in helping Rand, in throwing his body and his life at the Hand, they will claim it. This time it will take. He’ll be gone for good. I…”

Frank ducked his head to find her eyes. Had to see them before he’d allow that the agonized concern—the bone-chilling certainty—in her voice was for goddamn real. “You what?”

“I’m asking you to get in his way. Do what you must to keep him from—“

Snorting, Frank asked, “You ever been able to stop him?” Chains, a bullet to the brains of the very same mask she mentioned. All they bought Frank were hours at best. “When he got it in his head to do something, were you ever able to do anything more than maybe slow him down some?”

“No.” And there it was: a grin with no agenda. It faded fast. “I had hoped your odds would be better.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“You read to him.”

Frank looked on steadily.

“There’s food in his kitchen now. Was it you who made the cake?”

“Baking soda, baking powder, it’s all the same shit to me,” Frank said, and shrugged, and no, sir, he did not question why he took that bait. “What’s it got to—“

“You keep knives in the apartment, but not guns, and I don’t doubt for a moment that if Matthew needed him near, you would let that dog drool on the pillow you’ve claimed.” Elektra stood like a bridge rising; she got up to let something sail on through, to let it out. Frustration. Anger or hurt. Frank wasn’t given a chance to pin it down. Soon as she found her feet, she showed him her back, that braid. Loosened loops Matt’s fingers had probably found and taken apart, had likely draped around her body and his, when daylight was still on their side. “I would fight for him. In spite of that.”

“You do that.” Frank said, “He should know you think he’s worth what it’d cost.”

A glance over a stonily-set shoulder. “And what will it cost, hmm?”

Frank didn’t blink. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’ve already had a love of your life. Is it not greedy to—“

“You know what,” Frank said, shifting and twisting both burning wrists so the rope, slackened, grazed his thumb, the top tier of knuckles, “I’d say we’re done chatting.”

The rope cleared his fingertips, dropped to the floor. 

Frank stood. 

The want was there, simmering in hard-pumping blood, an urge to crack something: his stiff back, his neck, or hers. He left his hands open if slightly curled, held his place while she turned to face him, while she looked him over, again, maybe seeing him different, going by the combusted light of her eyes.

Elektra smiled, and Frank decided he was sick of that particular deciphering game. Before he was able to a damn thing about it, she hit him with, “What would Matthew say if you hurt me?”

“I suppose we could find out.”

“We could,” she all but hummed, “but not yet, I think.”

Sleek and sure as anything, Elektra strode over to the far end of the room. Frank took in the relief carved into the bar’s cracked front panel, a scene straight out of scripture. Covered in dust and debris, there was no saying where the lion stood, or the lamb. Or the wolf. 

“The Hand has business to attend to in the Kitchen tomorrow evening.” Behind the bar, Elektra tapped three separate series of numbers into the door’s keypad. It lit red, then yellow, and on the heels of the color change there was a sound like a boiler firing up. “It will take no more than an hour. While it shouldn’t attract Matthew’s attention, it couldn’t hurt to keep him consumed by something else entirely.”

Frank’s gaze narrowed. “How the fuck do you know—“

“I know,” Elektra said, before backing away from the door, before taking that initial step down a concealed stairway or ladder, “because I gave the order.”

***

“Frank?” 

He was there. The sniper-steady heartbeat seemingly standing at a greater distance than the few actual feet between them on the roof. Matt slanted his head into the wind, scented the dust and dirt Frank wore like hemostatic powder. Without a metallic trace of blood in the mix, the only thing it appeared to clot was his voice. 

Advancing, Matt tugged off a glove. The helmet. The previous hours, collected in the sweat at his temple, slid down the same slope of skin that had somehow held back the riot of his pulse as he ran, searching with every sense at his disposal, mouthing words that could have been mistaken for prayer. “Fra—

“What’d she say to you?” A murmur. “When you two were up here.”

Matt’s feet refused to follow his heart’s lead and halt. He cut across the roof, step by step, until Frank’s heat bolstered the flames of his vision. “She asked me to refuse Danny’s request for help.”

“That it?”

“She took a swipe at you,” Matt admitted, his lips twitching at Frank’s grunt, the slight easing of posture that allowed the wind’s cool hand to reach Matt’s face. “I told her she wasn’t welcome in our home.”

It was sharp, the breath Frank took. Sharp enough to stagger his shoulders. To turn out his voice like crystal, an unlikely prism of astonishment and disbelief. “You did what?”

“You heard me.”

Frank cleared his throat. “Hugo’s pacing down there,” he said. “Probably needs to go out.”

Matt narrowed his eyes and extended his hearing as Frank walked by, but the pace of his blood remained unchanged. Following the same path to the access door, taking the stairs slowly, Matt shed the other glove. Clenched both in one hand. “David’s fine, by the way.”

“Figured.”

“He said there should have been boxes,” Matt knelt to meet Hugo, “in the mill.”

“That right?”

“You tell me.” Matt rose with his palm braced on Hugo’s head. Fur threaded over his fingers like branches over a holloway. He dug in a little deeper, scratched and smoothed, tried to give back some of the comfort he took. “According to David, you saw them too. The guns. The bones. And Murakami.”

“Yeah, well, David says a lot of things. If I listened to every damn—“

“Fine.” Matt’s tone was tight and tired. “Will you at least tell me where you were?”

“A bar.”

“A bar.”

“About all I got to say is that I came to on an old, broken chair, with my hands tied. I got the rope loose enough to slip it, searched the place, found nothing but dust and cobwebs.”

“Truth,” Matt said, and turned it over, “but not all of it. What—“

“Matty, I—“ Frank raked a hand through his hair, the length of it, before letting his fist fall to mid-thigh. He sighed. Long and low, and he moved before it was done, displacing Matt’s fingers from both hips. His once-broken nose and open, inhaling mouth pressed to Matt’s throat. “Can we just…”

“Yeah.” Matt tipped his head into Frank’s, got a hand beneath dust and cotton, unearthing skin. “We can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are salves for bloodied and bruised perfectionists, each and every one much appreciated.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long stretches between updates are frustrating, I know (as a reader currently waiting on a few, do I ever!), and I'm so very appreciative of each and every one of you who come back to this fic. Thank you for your patience, for continuing on with me and the boys, for leaving comments (oh, the comments! they are nourishing).

Curt left the door standing wide open when he stepped back. “You’re late.”

“How’s that,” Frank asked, and the frown that formed, it felt like a wound of unknown origin, “when I didn’t say I’d be stopping by?”

“Matt beat you here by two days.” A pile of books and loose papers and folded-open magazines stacked like a failing chimney steadied as he passed, Curt walked on to the kitchen, where he stopped to look back. “Two days, Frank.”

Frank struck two knuckles against the laminate countertop. He did it again, and again, spaced out and even, determined to set his heartbeat to that knocking. “Yeah? What’d he—He finally take you up on that rematch?”

Curt’s smile was as good as the outline of brass knuckles in a worn-thin pocket. “If you’re wondering if your name came up, if he came here looking for answers,” he said, exposing a bit of that brass, one distinct, hardened curve, “put your mind at ease. Matt didn’t say a damn thing about you.”

There was a chasm in Frank’s head that silence had dug all the way down to his chest. Who the fuck knew when it began to form—somewhere over an ocean was probably a safe bet, at some coordinate that fell between Afghanistan and New York. Those days after he’d first taken a sledgehammer to a cement wall, with all that had happened, the void had filled up pretty quick with rounds of bullet casings, with the blood that dripped from his knuckles and nose. Once his business was mostly done, though, finished on the carousel where his second life had begun, all that life-giving noise drained out. 

Then Frank realized David was still there, and Leo, and Curt—and then came Matt, warmth and weight, the waves that held Frank above the surface and the sunlight on that water—and that desolate area didn’t stay empty for long. A few pockets remained, restrictive for being so unbelievably slight, but Frank went and found one on occasion, like when tripping over whatever he might say was a real possibility.

So while his eyes tracked Curt’s housekeeping, Frank kept his mouth shut.

After the caps from a couple of beer bottles had been tossed in the trash, after he’d extended one of those bottles to Frank, Curt claimed the opposite right angle. His position obscured the toaster, Frank’s warped reflection in the cold metal. “You gonna tell me why Matt looked like he was fighting a losing battle?”

Frank tried the beer, but it slipped sour on his tongue. “What’d he say?”

“He brought over some of Leo’s latest baking experiment,” Curt said, gesturing with his bottle to a white bakery box tied up in red and white striped twine, a blue-inked doodle on the lid pointing to a deliberate series of raised bumps. “Talked a bit about how it went at Hugo’s vet visit—“

“Shit.” Frank recalled Matt mentioning the day, the time, how it was the one slot they had open but it conflicted with a client meeting. “I was supposed to take him.”

Curt set down his beer, crossed his arms. The button-up’s seams strained at both shoulders. “What’s going on with you, Frank?”

On the nearest wall Curt had put up a framed print of a submarine. A craft designed to take into account the need to breathe in an environment with a lethal nature. Frank stared at it, at that manmade steel-lined sub, and in a voice scraping the air for oxygen, said, “Fuck, Curt, I don’t know.”

Pushing away from the counter, Curt popped the button at his collar, then the next. Why Curt did it, Frank wondered if it was to even the field, a willingness to meet another man’s vulnerability with the same. When he got close enough, Curt laid a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “We’ll figure it out. Or try to, which is a damn sight more than you’ve been doing, going on Matt’s appearance.”

Frank momentarily closed his eyes. “That bad?”

“Lost.” Curt squeezed Frank’s shoulder. “Waiting on you.”

“It’s 101. It’s goddamn basic training,” Frank said. “Never let someone get in your head.”

“Sure,” Curt said, like he knew where that random thread came from and where it led, like he’d gladly follow it to its end regardless. “Who’re we—“

“I loved her.” Frank flickered a look at Curt. “Maria.” Curt’s searching eyes narrowed, his mouth forming an affirmative. Frank shifted his gaze before Curt could sound it out. “With everything in me that was capable of it. I still do. No doubt it was far from fucking easy, but, you know, she loved me too. Loved me back like I deserved it, like those mornings I woke up with her taste on my lips and her mark on my skin weren’t a dream but a reality I’d somehow earned.” Dragging his sharpened stare up from the checkerboard floor, from where he had one foot in red and the other in black, Frank said, “If being with Matt is me being greedy, I—“

“Why in hell would you think—“

“Elektra.” That name in Frank’s mouth was worse than the goddamn beer. Swallowing did nothing to get rid of the ashy residue it left behind. “What she said, it stuck in my head.”

“When?”

“After David came by with the mill’s location, shit went down.” Frank shrugged, settled into the collar of his coat. “I came around, and she was there. How much property you think Bill still owns?”

“Hold up.” Curt leaned back a bit. “What’d Elektra do to—“

“Nah, nothing. She ran her mouth. Said Matt’s name one time too many,” Frank admitted, “and smiled ‘cause she fucking knew it.” He hesitated, but why was he there, why had he started to lay it all out if he was going to hold shit back. “I thought about ending her, Curt. And she asked me, okay, she wanted to know what Matt would’ve thought if I hurt her.”

“You know what I think?” Curt crossed to the sofa. “I think you’ve gotten yourself hung up on the wrong question.”

Frank made his way over. “What’s the right one?” 

“What would Matt think, what would he do, if she hurt you? And she did, Frank,” Curt said firmly. “Whatever else she said’s got you so twisted up, you’re bleeding over everything that’s good in your life. And if you try to tell me you haven’t been choking on it, I won’t believe another damn word that comes out of your mouth.”

Curt sat down then. If he noticed the crease his weight drew down the center of the blanket draped over the three back cushions, he didn’t move to smooth it out. He just beckoned Frank over to have a seat, said, “Now get your ass over here, and tell me the rest, which better include what in the hell Billy’s tax write-offs have to do with it.” 

His lips shifting into a semblance of a grin, the closest to it he’d managed in more than a week, Frank nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed, walking around the armchair to sit, “okay.”

***

A complicated, asymmetrical web spun out between the corners Matt had crushed to grip the paper grocery bag. He pressed with five fingertips, smoothing the creases, following strand to strand. It was a whisper of sound at most, but it broke the apartment’s suffocating stillness. It cut through the shuffle of noontime walkers, the regular beat of joggers on either side of the street, and from the next building over, the cloying voice of a man failing to entice a leashed cat up a flight of stairs.

“Are you hearing this?” he asked Hugo, pointing to the wall. 

The dog’s head rose from the floor in answer, the tags attached to his collar stirring.

“You’re not even on a—“ Matt lifted his chin, turned his head as the various components of the door’s lock tumbled and released. 

The scent embedded in the weave of Frank’s jacket preceded him. Black coffee, leaky pipes, book glue layered over paper Matt always assumed was stained as badly as old ceiling tiles. That specific combination had never before made Matt’s stomach clench in anticipation of a striking silence. Had never before reminded him of low tide, of waves withdrawing.

He whistled, short and soft, bringing Hugo to his side.

Frank’s footsteps halted where the dividing wall between the kitchen and hallway ended. He held something in front of his stomach, rubbed his thumbs raw against the material.

Matt’s eyes narrowed a fraction before he snorted. “You do know that hat in hand is just a figure of speech?”

“What?” Frank shifted his weight, seemed to realize what Matt referred to, and cleared his throat. He stepped forward, his tread slightly muffled by the transition from cement to rug. Frank’s hat landed on a nearby chair before his hands shoved into deep pockets. “I, ah, came from Curt’s.”

“Did he try Leo’s crumb bars?” Matt let go of Hugo’s collar to fold the grocery bag in half. Fenced in by the table and the dog, he made due with sorting fruit by the smoothness of their skins, then in rows ordered by ripeness. “She was worried the recipe was—“

“Matt,” Frank said, softly, and took the kiwi Matt hadn’t realized he’d bought from his hand. He broke the linked chain of loose bananas putting it down. “When I’m fucking up this bad you gotta tell me.”

“Why?” Matt pushed his glasses into place. “So you could put me off again? I was here, Frank. Waiting for you to—”

“Get my head outta my ass, I know it.”

Sleepless nights and Matt’s shadow had something in common. He’d realized that before he’d turned nine, before he could no longer see the dark, boy-like shape following his every move. There was never an adjustment period, an alternate sleep schedule. And after—He just kept going. The city, his world, was already a blur, a smudge, a black-walled furnace, but not even insomnia could turn down the volume on his hearing. On some level, he was able to function. He was fine.

Following Frank from the bedroom to the kitchen, letting three a.m. come and go with coffee grinds meant for the filter clenched in the palm of his hand, nine mornings in a row, what it cost him—Matt could put Frank’s mug on the arm of the couch and not sit beside him. He could think of the one time they’d tried to touch—at two a.m., after an accident of their hands meeting on the mattress—and about how even before his murmured apology, his abrupt move to the living room, Frank hadn’t really been in their bed. Matt could remember that particular morning without wanting to break the coffeemaker or his fist, because he was fin—“I’m not having this discussion right now.” Matt pocketed his key; picked up Hugo’s leash. “I have to—”

“I told Elektra I wasn’t going anywhere,” Frank said, his sure-footed voice changing course, on Matt’s heels. “So you can go, if that’s what you need to do. I’ll be here whenever it is you come home.”

Matt was aware of Hugo pressed against his leg only after the dog made a noise that curved sharply at the end, that tugged at Matt for attention. He licked his lips, felt it like scalding water, and swiped at the area with the back of one hand. “Explain.”

“Can we sit first?”

His jaw soldered tight, Matt narrowly bit out, “Go ahead.”

Choosing a corner of the couch, Frank waited the span of a slowly indrawn breath for Matt to join him. When that failed to happen, Frank nodded. “Okay.” Palms rasping up from knees to thighs, he asked, “You wanna know why I wasn’t in that mill? How ‘bout I give you the bullshit line Elektra fed me, about how we were gonna talk without David around, about how she thought a bar Bill owned was the right place for it.”

The way Frank said it, whether it was Bill or Billy or Russo, the name always sounded as rough and heavy as a boulder. A burden Frank wouldn’t let anyone else near, it left him bruised and cut open, bleeding, but Frank would rather that than— _And that’s why_ , Matt reasoned, why he stayed quiet, why he took one step towards the couch instead of the dozen or so that would have eased the distance throbbing with tension between them. 

“She’d tied my hands, like I said, had me in a chair in the center of the place. I wasn’t kidding about the dust, either. That stuff covered every goddamned thing. Not that it mattered, because the shit inside, almost all of it was busted. It was like prohibition had taken a fucking axe and went to town. Your—Elektra, she…” Frank’s voice, his heartbeat, faltered. Matt swayed in place, fisting his hands. “I figure she knew you’d find the mill, find her scent there, or something. Getting me out gave her a handy excuse. A version of truth. The location of Bill’s bar was maybe payment for services she expected to be rendered.”

Matt frowned, but continued to hold the weight of his silence.

“I’m supposed to get in your way.” Frank’s tone suggested their sleepless nights, absent of touch, had not only caught up with him, they had shredded skin and muscle, his defenses. “I’m supposed to be the thing you trip over on your way to doing the right thing. The thing that holds you down, that maybe fucks you until you can’t walk into any of the fights you decide to make your own.” Frank shoved a slightly shaking hand over his scalp. “Elektra didn’t strike me as picky, and could be I read her wrong, but far as I heard, she thought sex was the way to go.”

The words that came to mind, if Matt gave them shape, they would cut his own tongue. He swallowed every single one back, didn’t care that the effort stripped his throat. “Does she know, Frank? That you haven’t been keeping up your end of the deal.”

“Matty—“

“ _Why_?”

Frank stood and turned to face the question, said nothing. And Matt understood: Frank was studying him. He was picking out details, putting them together, trying to turn the sum into a solution. But the apartment’s walls weren’t buffeted by wind or battered by sand. The only thing that hummed even remotely like a bunker stocked with computers was the fridge, occasionally the radiator. The table was practically a farmer’s market, it was an altar for an abandoned paper bag, not a board covered in marked-up maps and reports outlining the breadth of current hostilities. 

That left Frank with the uneven, low-hanging knot of Matt’s tie. With Hugo’s dense fur curled around Matt’s steepled knuckles, and the resolute line of Matt’s mouth. As far as it went, it wasn’t much, as substantial as a bluff. 

“What are you askin’ me to answer to?”

Matt turned towards the kitchen. The man with the cat was still out there on his stoop; he was still coaxing, but in a hybrid language. Matt listened closely, would have attempted a translation, if he hadn’t felt something ripple and rise behind his breastbone. It might’ve been laughter, like a tidal wave, trying for his throat. The raw muscles there rejected the sound, reshaped it into one Matt barely recognized. _Christ_ , the last time he’d heard it had been in that alley, when he’d knelt beside his father on the—“Where is she?”

Frank’s breathing slowed. Deepened. He stood in front of Matt, a chasm of near silence.

“Where,” Matt repeated, “is she?”

Quietly, Frank said, “I wanted to put my hands on you every fucking night since—I wanted to feel you, read to you, do any goddamn thing I had to so you’d smile, but she was…she was always in the room.” Frank sniffed, hard and abrupt, and thumbed his nose. Scraped that hand down over his mouth and beard. “I stopped sleeping, yeah? And damn right I did, ‘cause the last time I caught more than five, I had to watch you with her. Had to watch it happen. Know this, Matty, combat was a fucking picnic in some park compared to that.”

Matt’s brow creased. “Why didn’t you tell me—“

A boot scuffed the floor; an aborted step forward. “It was like Curt said, I was choking on it. Everything Elektra said. All the shit it dredged up. I’d go through the day doing my level best to breathe. How the fuck was I gonna manage talking? Huh? Didn’t matter what I said, I knew I’d be risk—”

“Matt.” An insistent pounding on the door punctuated Danny’s voice. “I’m not leaving this time. I brought a tent, I’ll—”

“Don’t,” Frank took the step he’d refused himself before, “please.”

Danny didn’t let up. “C’mon, Matt, open the door. I have something—“

“This isn’t…Now’s not a good time, Danny.” Matt closed his eyes, focused on Frank’s heart beating strong and steady. “I’ll call you la—“

“It’s about Elektra.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you decided to read past the opening note, thank you! Comments and kudos are _most_ welcome.
> 
> Title taken from MRKTS "Can't Let You Go."


End file.
